Cures stay home, rescues sail

Status: Already answered

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Medieval miracle collections record two great genres of wonder: the sick healed at the shrine, and the distant devotee — the drowning sailor, the chained prisoner — saved by invocation alone. The conjecture is that the mix is a strict function of the beneficiary's distance from the shrine: cures dominate near, rescues dominate far, because the sick could travel or be carried to the tomb while the imperiled could only call out from where disaster found them. The monks who kept the registers recorded what arrived; geography did the sorting. If it holds, a miracle collection's type-mix measures the spatial reach of a cult as objectively as coin finds measure trade, and collections without provenance notes can be given catchment profiles from their contents alone.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Primary clause: in miracle collections recording beneficiary origins, the share of at-a-distance invocation miracles (rescue, peril, captivity) among beneficiaries from beyond roughly 100 km is at least twice that share among local beneficiaries; incubation and tomb cures show the reverse gradient. Secondary: the crossover distance is stable across cults of similar rank.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Edited miracle collections with provenance data in the Acta Sanctorum, notably the Liber miraculorum sancte Fidis and the Becket miracle collections of William of Canterbury and Benedict of Peterborough.

In the atlas

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Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

This packet was produced in a single blind Write from model-internal knowledge only, with no repository reads, web access, database queries, or any tool call other than this Write.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Finucane's statistical study of ~3,000 miracles at nine shrines established precisely this: local beneficiaries received shrine cures while distant devotees were rescued/cured at home by invocation, the type-mix shifting with distance; Sigal documented the same gradient for France. The specific connection is published, not merely adjacent.

R.C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (1977)
P.-A. Sigal, L'homme et le miracle dans la France medievale (1985)

Predictions

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